Psychology Professor Finds That Cartoons Illustrate Many Causes of Neurosis--To Use Magazine Pictures in Lectures

Three drawings in the magazine The New Yorker, showing a baby in a pen, a clerk in a cashier's cage, and a prisoner behind the bars were responsible for the introduction of cartoons into a psychology course of Dr. F. L. Wells, instructor of Experimental Psychopathology, it was learned yesterday in an interview at the Psychopathic Hospital.

With permission already granted to reproduce any clipping from the magazine that he wants, Dr. Wells will soon be illustrating his lectures with lantern slides of drawings by Peter Arno, I. Klein, and Otto Soglow. At present Dr. Wells has some 30 odd cartoons which have been carefully selected to explain to his class various psychological reactions in the easiest and quickest manner possible.

A sketch of a tardy couple on a wharf watching a liner disappear on the horizon with the caption below "Don't just stand there. De Something!" Dr. Wells says is a perfect illustration of one of the many things that drives people insane. The picture of a fireman training a great stream of water on a blazing building and exclaiming "Geez, I hope the chief is watching," is the best medium that there is to show an inexperienced student that every individual on earth desires praise.

Other phases in the study of psychology which Dr. Wells has found in abundance among the pages of The New Yorker, and a similar German magazine called Simplicissimus, are nauseaism, symbolism, marriage, and social adjustments, as well as perversions, thought patterns, and sublimation.